Written with Shroomie, with input from Shep for added insanity!
THE ULTIMATE EPILOGUE, P.II
Previously on Ultimate Epilogue wrote:“As I said, fellas, ain’t nothin’ good ol’ Murcan firearmin’ won’t fix! Look at how we smashed that piece of ol’ lieberal filth, right in the centre!”
“Hey!” Deevon cried, seeing tracks amongst the trash “Our boy was here! He went thataway!”
“Fuck yeah!” Cleytus momentarily forgot about his fear and cocked his six-shooter “Let’s go get ‘im and get outta ‘ere!”
“Yeeee-haw, fellas! There’s a bottle o’booze ta the first one to head shot ‘im!”
The three Sovereign Citizens followed their prey through the creepy corridors and display sets of the Joanson Spaceflight Museum. Despite the bright morning light, many parts of the desolate building were bathed in shadow. Eerie reflections danced on the walls, on mockups of lunar rovers and display cases full of equipment. The flickers of light played merry hell with perceptions, and the deeper the trio went, the more nervous they became.
Cleytus, in particular, couldn’t help but clutch his Little Jeebus pendant. These ancient rooms scared the bejeebus out of him for some reason, and while temporary manly fervor managed to mask those feelings, they were now creeping back.
Spacesuited wax figures of apes
glared at him from their stands. Empty mannequin eyes seemed to track his every move. The sligtest disturbance in the trash that littered the floors rang out across the empty halls with unnatural intensity.
Eventually his panicked glances and constant double-checks managed to irritate Bubba, who growled at him.
“Cleytus! Pull yerself together!”
“I can’t help it, Bubba! I swear, those apes were lookin’ strait at us!”
“Monkeys.”
“Say what?” Cleytus glanced at Deevon, who was idly kicking around a broken space helmet.
“Monkeys. These fellas were chimps, chimps ain’t apes.”
“What are ya, some sort of good for nuthin’ intellectual? Tryin’ to teach me, huh? Like on of dem dirty teachers? Pappy said never listen to dem teachers!”
“Shut up, boys! Remember why we’re here!”, Bubba yelled at them, waving his elephant gun around, “The lil’ rat could be aroun’ any....”
Something small and human-like suddenly darted across the corridor, making Cleytus jump and discharge his six-shooter. The bullet ricocheted and almost hit Bubba, but the gung-ho team lader didn’t care. He took off in pursuit, emitting a terrifying battle cry.
His mates followed, waving their guns around in a stunning display of tactical acumen and careful movement across hostile territory. They thus crashed, together, into a room that the little boy darted into just seconds ago.
It was square, mostly empty and well lit through broken skylights. It contained only one item of note - a massive lunar lander, hung on cables suspended from ceiling rafters, its spidery legs hovering menacingly over the inevitable scene of cruelty that was to unfold here.
Inevitable, because this particular room had no other exit, and their quarry was right there, breathing heavily, cornered and alone and staring at them in horror.
“Gotcha, fella!” Bubba yelled and took aim.
“Hell yeah!” Deevon hollered. “Let’s show that good fur nothin’ space varmint what’s what!”
Shots rang out in the room. Despite the short range, only one bullet managed to hit Josh, who fell to the ground, screaming in pain. He watched helplessly as the horrible, cruel men approached, intent on finishing him off, when suddenly things started growing dark.
Storm clouds covered the sky in seconds, cutting off nearly all light. It became so dark that the Sovereign Citizens could only see glimpses of each other, and reflections off shining thermal foil covering the lander above their heads.
Then, before they could take their bearings, the eerie silence was broken by the sound of a snapping cable.
As one, they looked up. Ominous red light washed over them. With a sound of creaking metal, the lander’s ascent stage tilted downwards, staring right into their souls with its glowing red windows.
A second cable snapped. Two of the lander’s legs landed heavily on the ground.
Cleytus started to scream in horror.
“WHAT THE HELL IS THAT THING?!”
“IT’S THE DEEBIL CLEYTUS! QUICK, USE YER SHOOTIN’ IRON!”
The final cable was torn apart, and the lunar module landed on the ground with a thump. Terrifying voices from beyond the grave whispered in the background, crackling with intermittent radio static, as the huge machine moved with unnatural fluidity. Although slow and lumbering, its powerful shock-absorbent legs could easily crush a man.
Bubba didn’t think for long. His elephant gun roared and the absurdly massive round punched a hole in the thin mylar foil covering the lander’s base.
The lander didn’t flinch, and launched itself at the group. The mysterious whispers rose into a screeching, terrible crescendo of insanity and pain. Deevon dove to the ground, losing his double-bareled shotgun in the process. By some miracle, Bubba managed to avoid getting trampled, too - but the leg that tried to kill him smashed a huge hole in the wall behind him.
“Cleytus! Shoot it! Shoot it good!” he yelled, trying to load another round, but failing due to overwhelming panic. The lander towered over him. Bubba felt some terrifying power slowly force his head upward, towards the lander’s face and the menacing, snapping forward hatch. He dropped another round on the ground and screamed in pain and terror.
“Don’t look into its eyes! DON’T LOOK INTO ITS EYES!” Cleytus screamed
“I...can’t....Jeebus...help...me...”
Jeebus! That was it! Where Murcan ingenuity failed, Jeebus would provide!
Cleytus tore his pendant off his neck and thrust his figurine into the air, towards the hellish spawn of Deebil.
“The power of Jeebus compels you!” he screamed, trying to be louder than the radio static and strange voices. The lander turned its ascent stage towards him, as if intrigued. Bubba collapsed to the ground and began crawling towards the exit in fear-addled panic.
“The power of Jeebus compels you!!!” Cleytus screamed, one note higher this time. Somewhere to the rear, Deevon dove for his shotgun and helped Bubba get onto his feet, and then they both began yelling at Cleytus to leg it. Deevon even fired some deershot into the back of the cabin, but even though the buckshot clearly went through, the machine seemed unfazed.
“I AM A GAWD WARRIOR! JEEBUS IS MY SHEPPERD I SHALL NOT WANT MY MOMMY!!!” Cleytus’ shouts were beginning to reek of desperation. The lander leaned over him, examining him up close, its windows shining with swirling, hypnotizing energies of some strange netherworld. “THE POWER OF JEEBUS COMPELS YOU!!!”
“No! Cleytus! Get out! RUN!”
The forward hatch snapped open. Swirling red light enveloped Cleytus, and oxygen hoses snaked out. They writhed and tangled like living things, wrapping themselves around his ankles before coiling up around his torso.
“The power...of Jeebus...compels...you...” the man managed to sputter one last time. He shuddered with fear and panic, but found himself unable to move, hypnotized somehow by the terrible eldricht energies shining from the machine’s innards.
The hoses tugged, and snatched Cleytus off the ground. In a whirl of movement, the flailing, terrified man was hung in front of the forward thruster assembly, and sprayed in the face with incredibly toxic and corossive hypergolic propellant. His skin began to blister and dissolve, his eyeballs exploded and began to flow down his face, hanging to their sockets with strands of nerves.
He screamed as his face melted off, and the two remaining Sovereign Citizens would never forget that bloodcurdling sound. It lasted for a long time, even after Cleytus was pulled inside. It sounded as if his very soul was being torn apart, consumed to fuel whatever foul processes powered the deebillish spacecraft in its single-minded quest.
The lander turned around, and lurched at Bubba and Deevon. Blood oozed out of the gunshot hole on its hull, smearing the commemoratory plaque on its hull with crimson fluid, reddening the engraved designation of LM-666.
They ran. They ran like they have never ran before. For those mighty, those powerful Sovereign Citizens, have just learned about true fear.
They delved deep into the dark corridors, chased by the sound of steel legs scraping against the floor behind them. They heard the infernal device batter down walls, and its static-filled shrieks echoed in the empty corridors.
“Deevon, what in Gawd’s name is that thing?” Bubba sputtered when they stopped for breath, and to take their bearings in a ‘Women In Space’ exhibition hall. It was merely one of hundreds of exhibits. The museum seemed endless, far too large for the building it was housed in. Display halls and corridors stretching every which way. It was like they were stuck in the mind of a deranged lieberal nerd.
“It’s like we’re stuck in the mind of a de-raynged luberal nerd!” Deevon cried desperately. “Gawddamn science majors! We gotta get outta here before our dicks get limp!”
“What are you sayin’? I thought this place was dead!”
“It’s been corrupted, Bubba! Every wall is soaked with sha-yunc! We can’t fight this, that’s how the lieberals made it! This whole building is one he-yudge trap!”
“We shoulda listened to Cleytus and his pappy, man!” by employing his incredible mental powers, Bubba remembered Cleytus’ warning from not that long ago.
Another howl echoed through the corridors. The museum’s PA system came alive, shrieking last words of long dead astronauts.
“Oh Gawd they found us! They know we’re here! That’s what the space program and its lies were all about! THAT’S WHY THEY FAKED THE MOON LANDINGS!!! SO THEY COULD KEEL US ALL!!!”
The screeching of metal lander feet suddenly stopped.
Deevon looked like he was going to yell some more, but Bubba put a hand over his mouth “Shut up! It can hear us! It can...smell us.” he whispered.
A landing pad struck the floor heavily, right behind the thin drywall that separated this display hall from the rest of the museum. Toxic propellant vapors seeped from tiny holes poked in the wall by time. Bubba started crawling back, desperately clutching Deevon’s mouth so that he wouldn’t scream - and crawled right into a mannequin.
The mannequin fell and broke apart, causing a minor avalanche of trash and exhibits. Half a second later, all the telescreens in the exhibit turned themselves on, showering the hall with white noise and static.
The drywall exploded, smashed aside like cardboard by the fifteen tonne lander. The machine shrieked angrily, smelling its prey, and lurched ahead. Clouds of toxic propellants billowed behind it, sprayed from RCS thrusters it was firing to maintain balance.
Bubba screamed and ran, yelling “It’s every man for himself! Let the strongest win!” in a surprising bout of eloquence. Deevon crawled over the overturned mannequin of some female astronaut and legged it, too. There was an exit, a small and low corridor that the lander wouldn’t fit in, and that’s where they were going.
The white noise and static on telescreens began showing glimpses of maniacal laughter, deranged moonscapes, drug-addled spacewalks, women astronauts and maniacal laughter of drug addled maniacal women astronauts spacewalking on deranged moonscapes. They screamed from all sides about Valhalla and honorable axe-combat, their broken and distorted laughs chasing Deevon as he fled the display hall, coughing and sputtering due to hydrazine poisoning.
He saw mirages and hallucinations, long-dead astronauts reaching out from the telescreens, trying to pull him into their world of cackling madness. A hundred different worlds called to him, each one more insane than the last.
And then it was over, as he stumbled into the corridor and collapsed. Bubba was there, loading his elephant gun. He lost most of his spare rounds, so he was very careful not to drop this one.
But he did, when the entire expanse of the tunnel’s entrance was taken by the infernal form of LM-666. Deevon shrieked again, but relaxed a bit when he realized the ceiling was too low for the machine to enter.
He cocked his shotgun and yelled, “This is it, Bubba! Let’s keel it!”
It was a short-lived moment, though. The LM turned, and a storage module unlocked in its mylar-covered descent stage. And with a hellish whine, not unlike the sound of a hundred angry hell-hounds, another demonic contraption leapt to the ground. Its instrument panel lit up with an unholy light, and the front-mounted camera whipped and hissed like thousands of poisonous snakes.
The Sovereign Citizens froze, their triumph turned into dismay, as the hell-rover unfolded itself. It whipped its antenna into a concrete wall, tearing three nasty gashes in it, revved its four electric engines, and leapt forth at its prey.
They ran. They had no desire other than to leave this land of demons and insanity, and ran as fast as their legs could carry them.
Deeper into The Place. Deeper into the swirling, collapsing, interlocking realities of a museum filled with their greatest nightmares.
The deeper they went, the more deranged their surroundings became. The corridors twisted and sagged, and entire universes came clashing together. Briefly, the walls ruined by time were sparkly white again, the floors filled with nerds going an about their nerdy pursuits. Weird symbols appeared in the air, formulas of immense complexity and power. Realities seemed crossed together in The Place, almost as if it existed in many places and many times, different yet somehow the same across all of them.
Space Shuttles soared into the sky and exploded, to the horror of people watching them. Great spaceships duelled in the skies. Spaceplanes launched from cold stops, carrying deranged physicists into the sky. Space dogs howled on the dark side of the moon.
Were these visions glimpses into other times, other worlds? Or just products of hydrazine-poisoned brains slowly losing all connection with reality? Deevon caught himself pondering these deep questions, which made him feel very awkward and uncomfortable and scared.
Then he noticed the homicidcal lunar rover was gone. The visions were gone, too, and so was Bubba. He stopped, trying to figure out what had happened.
He was lost. He was alone. He could hear the murderous nerd-machines, somewhere out there, still hunting, still hungry for his soul. His poor, abused, immortal soul.
Deevon leaned against the wall, choking back tears. He’d die in this place. He was sure of it.
From a broken and filthy display case, a space suit stared at him.
Sssspace cadet! something whispered into his ear
Sssstand at attention!
Deevon leapt to his feet and looked around frantically, trying to point his shotgun at something he could kill. But there was nothing. Nothing but darkness and disused space suits.
The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once. The display hall, just seconds ago merely a tiny, cramped room with only a couple of suits, now appeared to stretch into infity. Millions of display cases, all somehow pointed straight at him. Millions of empty helmets staring menacingly.
The voice hissed into his ear again,
How undisturbed, the sleep of the foolissssshhhh. How pure, the blisssssss of the ignorant. Are you ready for asssscension, ssssspace cadet?
“Get out of my head, yer good fer nuthin’ nerdlings!” Deevon screamed
Sarcastic laughter, interspred with hisses and whispers and crackling radio static was the only response.
“I did nuthin’ to you! Let me go!”
When in panic, when in doubt, run in circlesss, ssscream and ssshhhout!
Deevon noticed a glimpse of movement somewhere to the side, and instinctively fired his shotgun. The deershot smashed the display case and holed the space suit stored inside. It slumped forwards...
And began to move.
The Sovereign Citizen screamed like a little girl and turned to run, but fell straight into the waiting arms of another suit. He yelled some more, looking straight into the old, dusty and cracked Mercury helmet. The suit was battered and damaged, but held him tightly in an unnaturally strong grip.
More space suits left their cases and shambled towards him, coming from all sides. Deevon could swear he could see pale, dead faces behind the visors. A slow, ominous chant arose, growled by a million voices from beyond the grave.
Part of the sssship...part of the crew...the final frontier...waits only for you...
“NO! I dun wanna be a part of yer crew! NO! PLEASE!”
Part of the sssship...part of the crew...the final frontier...waits only for you!
The unholy, hellish constructs began to dress Deevon. The man kicked and screamed and fought and then finally began to bawl and beg, but it gave him nothing. With shambling movements, he was slowly but surely suited up. The lower and upper parts of the Hermes suit locked into place. Gloves were slid into their connector rings and twisted. And finally, a helmet was lowered, covering Deevon’s sobbing, terrified face.
A snap. The locking ring made the final seal. A sickening crunch, then a scream, echoing through eternity. Blood began to ooze from holes and tiny tears that time wore into the old suit’s fabric.
Before Deevon Eddie Jee-Jay Prustbeet’s final scream stopped to echo, the suits surrounding him hissed, in unison
Rejoice! You...have entered...the sssspace program!
Before Bubba realized he got separated from Deevon, the lunar rover had already caught up to him. The machine viciously whipped him with the antenna, tearing lines of flesh from his back and throwing the Sovereign Citizen to the ground.
It howled with triumph, eerily reminescent of mission controllers cheering the first ever succesful lunar landing, but somehow laced with inhuman, mind-flaying malice born in the depths of Hell itself.
But Bubba wasn’t some limp-dicked science major. His tough guy Murcan machoism overcame the rampant panic at the prospect of having to fight a cursed Deebilspawn of a machine, and so he grasped his elehpant gun by the barrel and smashed the rover’s camera with one mighty swing of the buttstock.
The rover began to thrash, its metal mesh wheels spinning like buzzsaws, tearing apart concrete and tile and spraying lethal fragments around.
Bubba screamed a mighty football battle cry and smacked the camera again. In his fervor, he failed to dodge a spinning mesh tire, which clipped his chest. Blood and chunks of meat sprayed onto the dirty walls. Bubba fell to his knees in shock, but managed to pull himself together before the machine applied another tire to his face. He’d walk it off. He always walked everything off, and by Jeebus, it worked great!
In a rare display of clever tactics, he retreated into the nearest door. He turned around, ready to reload and show the rover some good ol’ Murcan firearmin’...but all he faced was an entirely doorless wall, with only the blood-stained floor indicating an opening was ever here at all.
Dread returned. This wasn’t something he could fight. The twisted reality of The Place returned in full force, washing away that brief and precious moment when Bubba thought he could fight its infernal forces and win.
A single light went on inside the room Bubba was now trapped in. It illuminated a small TV, standing in a forest of towering file cabinets. A space birdie - the same as before - appeared on the screen, but its cheery demeanor was replaced by a cruel scowl.
“Rise and shine, space cadet! It is time for your final test!” it growled angrily. “Are you observant? Are you clever? Did you listen well to the presentation so far?”
An elephant gun round pierced the TV and smashed it into a million pieces. But another one activated somewhere in the darkness, and the bird’s face scowled at Bubba again.
“That is not acceptable behavior, space cadet! It might get you into more trouble than you’re already in!”
“I’ma gonna have ya fer Kuntucky Fried Chick’n!” Bubba bawled at the space birdie. He stuck his hand inside his pants, searching for more elephant gun rounds, but to his despair came out empty handed. Unmanned by the lack of armamentations, he blubbered, “Lemme outta here! Lemme outta ‘ere!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Bubba.”
“How d’ya know my name?!” Bubba’s eyes widened. In fear.
The animated birdie regarded him with its eyes, large black inhuman orbs that pierced into his soul.
“I watched you pathetic creatures, panting and sweating as you ran through my corridors. I hear everything. I see everything.”
“What do you want from me?!” Bubba blubbered. Those black eyes just wouldn’t... blink.
“You will be tested, space cadet! Only through observance, knowledge and skill you may win your freedom, and your very own Young Astronaut Pioneer badge!”
Bubba gulped. He never liked tests much. He always preferred kicking around the pigskin at the field and going to the locker room to shower with the boys. He hated them luberal professors in their ivory towers and was right there at the Sovereign Citizen Freedom Rally where they threw burning books at the high-falootin’ teachers of the elementary school. The thought of that gave him renewed strength. He was sure he could outsmart this animated cartoon luberal, and that museum still had to have plenty of books he could set on fire and throw...
“Bring it on, Tweety!” Bubba challenged.
“As you wish! Observe well, space cadet!”
The ground shook, and the file cabinets began to rattle and shake, too. Their impossibly long drawers opened with tremendous bangs and crashes, smashing into each other and spilling their contents onto the floor.
Photographs. Thousands and thousands of photographs of people in white space suits standing and walking and playing football on the Moon.
Bubba laughed. This was going to be
easy. “Everyone knows the moon landings were faked!”
The bird sneered. “ Why, then the task you stand before shall be simple! Which one of these pictures from the Moon is a falsificate?”
Bubba’s eyes went wide. This was surely a trick question! They were trying to trick him with their lieberal lies and fancy shmancy wordy birdies! What was a fulssyphlokat, anyways?
He began to sweat. The blood loss and pain didn’t make thinking through the trick any easier. He glared at the photographoids, them strange picturial things. How to spot a fulssyphlokat without knowing what it is? Does this mean a fake photo? But if the moon landings were fake, then ALL the photos were fake!
Bubba was confused. And worse, his hands began to shake at the memory of Cleytus’ fate. If he failed, what sort of punishment did the Deebil’s birdie have for him? What did Bubba do to deserve it?
“You hurt an astronaut. I don’t like people who hurt astronauts.” the bird answered the unasked question.
Somewhere nearby, the satanic LM-666 howled. It was back on the trail again.
“And neither does he. Chose well, Bubba. Time is running short.”
Bubba shivered in fear. He bent down to his knees to pray to Jeebus, and partly because blood loss was making his head woozy. He wished he had a juicy communion steak to chew on right now. As he talked to his personal lawrd and savior, something on the floor caught his eye.
One of the pictographs. Of the moon. As if the assturdnuts on the moon weren’t bad enough, this one was even worse, even more ridiculous and hokey and obviously fake. It had to be the dumbest most unbelievable stupidest thing he’d ever seen. Dumber than even maths.
Bubba cackled and with shaky hands picked the pictograph up and showed it to the space birdie to spite its limp-beaked animated intellectual ways.
“This! This is your fullsyphlokat! It’s faker than fake! It is the fakerest of them all!” he proclaimed as spittle frothed at his mouth. “JEEBUS SAID SO! HALLELUJAH!”
The birdie smiled. In his fervor, Bubba did not notice the sheer cruelty of that smile.
A portion on the wall suddenly split open, revealing a hidden doorway.
“Well done. Here’s your exit, Bubba.”
“Yeee!” gibbering, the sovereign citizen scrambled towards the opening doors. A blinding light came from the portal. He ran through it. Finally, he was free from the cursed room, free from the staring birdie. He found himself in a barely-lit library, surrounded by bookshelves. But instead of hurting his brain, the presence of so many inty-lekshual edjumacational materials filled him with glee. He’d burn them all! He swore he’d burn them all. Throw them at the lieberals. Use them to roast that gawddamn space birdie into a bucketmeal of Kuntucky Fried Cheeken--
A form emerged from the dark distance. A shambling human form.
“Deevon! By golly you made it! Oh boy, we’re gonna have the biggest ‘ere book barbecue!” he ran towards his friend but stopped when he realized that something was wrong.
It wasn’t Deevon. It was... it was clad in a space suit. The name PRUSTBEET was on a tag affixed to the creature’s chest.
“...Deevon?” Bubba whimpered. The thing didn’t slow. Onwards it walked, strode, towards him. Bubba could hear the death-hiss of its breathing apparatus. Radio static began to fill the air.
“No... no...!” Bubba cried desperately. He collapsed to the floor in a bloody mess and began to crawl away from the spaceman. “Somebody help me! Please! No! Stay away!”
It was coming for him.
He turned to face it, and he saw... he saw it’s
true form.
Bubba screamed and tried to crawl away. The moon landing hoax pictograph was still crumpled in his hand. He understood now. The birdie tricked him! That portal was not an exit at all!
“BUT THE PICTURE WAS FAKE! THE MOON LANDING WAS FAKE!” he wept in vain, to no one in particular.
The footsteps, the breathing, the static, they were all getting louder. The spaceman was coming closer.
Bubba clawed desperately at the wall where the door had once been. But it wouldn’t open again. He was trapped. Doomed.
With no choice left, he turned to face the spaceman, and angrily threw the picture at him.
The space suited apparition stopped and glared at Bubba for a moment. Then it silently offered its hand to him.
With no other option, the sovereign citizen fearfully, hesitantly, took it.
Bubba screamed as his eyes burned.
Reality twisted. Already unstable, it folded ten times within each other. Dimensions exploded, multiplied like a dividing ovum, and then died a trillion deaths. And then, just like that, Bubba was on his knees, jagged and hard regolith between his fingers. He felt the first pangs of horrifying pain, as air pressure inside his lungs began to tear them apart. His blood and saliva was starting to boil. He opened his mouth to scream, but could not.
He collapsed, looking up into the sky, and saw the face of the Spaceman, standing above him, the Earth over his shoulder. His skin was now giving way to clouds of rapidly expanding vapor that were once his bodily fluids. The pain was excruciating.
“YOU HAVE CHOSEN POORLY,” it spoke, and somehow Bubba could hear these words as the pain overwhelmed him. As the pressure differential tore apart the blood vessels inside his brain, he slid into a coma, and then death.
The picture he was so certain was fake gently floated down to the regolith, settling down on it in one-sixth gravity.
Josh was dying. He was sure of it, and even though he seemed to have accepted it, his body did not, and kept fighting. He wasn’t even scared anymore: the gunshot wound was painful at first, but right now it felt like merely...a spot of warmth.
He didn’t really want to go. If he did, he’d never have kept running for as long as he has. Although he was glad he got to experience the wonder and awe of this place before the LAWD decided it was time for him to go.
“Well, kid, it’s done, in a short while everything will...oh God. Boy, this looks bad. Shit.”
Josh opened his eyes, and saw someone standing above him. He wasn’t sure if it was the shock, or pain or something, but the silhouette seemed a bit blurry and out of focus, as if it wasn’t
quite there.
“Damn. This must suck, but hang in there for just...one...moment...”
Something’s changed. Very subtly, almost imperceptibly, space and time shifted a gear, and then took a u-turn and crashed into a lamp post.
Josh suddenly felt just fine. He got up, and finally took a good look at the person standing next to him.
“Holy...I saw you. I saw you in the picture box! You’re Bob Johnson!”
The astronaut’s apparition smiled a charming smile, “Damn straight I am, kid! Sorry I came back so late.”
“What are you doing here? The picture box said you died!”
“Well, yeah. But I got better.” Bob Johnson laughed at his own joke “But more seriously, I had no idea things got so bad. This place, it deserves better. Kids like you deserve better, you know what I mean? So I came back. Don’t worry. It’s all gonna be better.”
Josh really wanted to understand, but he was confused. His was the only world he knew.
His confusion only grew more intense when he felt an overwhelming and sudden falling sensation. The world around him was flickering and twisting and...changing. He was falling, yet he wasn’t, the walls were at once there and not there, and apparitions and ghosts and visions popped in and out of existence.
“What’s going on? What’s happening, Bob Johnson?!”
“Something wonderful.”
The changes in the past finally propagated, and the space-time wave function collapsed into a quantum ball. Then it exploded. And Bob Johnson was right: in the tiny speck of time during which Josh could experience it, it
was wonderful.
“And remember kid.” he seemed to her in the last moments before everything changed “You owe me one. You must
bring tits to space!”
Kennedy Space Center
Florida, Murca
“Armstrong Base? God, this is tacky.”
“Well, he was the first man on the Moon, right? It’s not like we didn’t saw that one coming.”
“Oh come on, Gene...it’s humanity’s first lunar base! We go back to the Moon after fifty years, and we really have to...eh, whatever. Not for me to decide anyways, and the public supposedly loves it.”
Gene Micheal Shroompard, Flight Crew Director assigned to the Orion program shrugged. The issue wasn’t really important enough to warrant more from him - he had to select a four-man astronaut crew from a pool of international candidates, and manage all the stupid little details of the upcoming mission.
“Right. So, back on topic - we took some submissions for your first words upon leaving the lander, and the PR guys think this is best. I’m not so sure myself, but check it out.”
Svetmaya Svetmayska Surnameova took the tablet from Shroompard and glanced at it. She tried the line a few times.
“Out of the Great Sea to Middle Earth I am come. In this place will I abide, and my heirs, unto the ending of the world...”
Shroompard studied her sour expression and nodded. “Terrible?”
“Yeah. Let’s use something else.”
Somewhere else in Murca, Josh Sully woke up. He was a little dizzy for some reason, and couldn’t escape the feeling he was forgetting about something really important. Well, it couldn’t be
that important that it couldn’t wait until coffee. Yes, coffee.
The young aerospace engineer went downstairs. He only just graduated, and so was in that strange but wonderful time when one could wake up at 10 o’clock without yet experiencing the terror on the prospect of a jobless future.
Not that he was worried. It was 2015, the space industry was booming, and his profession was in constant demand.
“Hey, son.” his dad said. The air smelled of scrambled eggs and coffee.
“Hi dad. What’s up?” dad didn’t usually make breakfast.
“Mom had errands to run. Here, sit down and eat.”
And Josh did, although something in the back of his mind kept screaming that things were off. Wrong, somehow. As if this was all a dream.
“Boy, you look terrible.”
“Yeah, I may be coming down with something...say, dad, what’s that?” Josh pointed to a thick envelope on the coffee table.
“That? Good news, that’s what it is.”
“How do you know?”
“I opened it. Sorry.”
“Dad!”
“I said I’m sorry, okay? But I was too curious...see for yourself.”
Josh’s dad picked up the letter and showed it to his son. It was...an answer about his job application!
“Altea Aerospace. You hit it big, son.”
“Holy shit...” Josh couldn’t think of anything else to say “Damn. I will...I will have to move to San Dorado, but...damn!”
“Yeah. I thought you’d like it.”
Josh smiled. Yes. At last, he was on track towards the bigger, wider world.
For some reason, he couldn’t stop thinking about tits, though. Tits...in space!